Streams

The Grass Is Greener

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

On today’s show: Adam Davidson of the New York Times Magazine and NPR’s Planet Money team explains why the Bronx can’t be more like Brooklyn. Then Jeffrey Eugenides joins us for the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club to talk about his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex! A master glass blower and a designer tell us all about the Mobile Glass Lab on Governor’s Island. Plus, the editor and two contributors of Central Park: An Anthology on what the Park means in their lives and to the lives of New Yorkers in general.

Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money and contributor to the New York Times Magazine, looks into why the Bronx has been left out of much of the economic boom in New York City. His article “Why Can’t the Bronx Be More Like Brooklyn?” appeared in the July 10 New York Times Magazine.

Do you want to weigh in on the pros and cons of various New York’s boroughs? Leave a comment or give us a call at 212-433-9692.

Middlesexwon the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it’s the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club’s selection for July! It tells the story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus to Detroit, then to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe. Calliope is not like other girls—she has to uncover a family secret and piece together her genetic history in order to reveal who she truly is. Jeffrey Eugenides joins us to discuss the novel.

Get the conversation started now by leaving a comment or question about the book!

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the studio glass movement in the United States, and to celebrate, the Corning Museum of Glass has built a mobile Glass Lab, which is traveling around the country giving free glassblowing demonstrations and working with designers to create unique forms in glass. This month it's been at Governors Island, working with designers from the Cooper-Hewitt exhibit there. Master glassblower Eric Meek and with designer Harry Allen tell us about the program and about how to blow glass.

Andrew Blauner, editor of Central Park: An Anthology, is joined by two of the collection’s contributors—author Adam Gopnik and Doug Blonsky, the senior executive responsible for managing and overseeing the park. They talk about the 843 carefully planned acres of Central Park and how it has made an impression on the 38 million annual visitors and on the lives and work of a diverse array of writers.

John Damani Mahama was on the Lopate Show on July 10 to discuss his memoir and his political rise to become the Vice President of Ghana. Yesterday, following the death of Pres. John Atta Mills, Mr. Mahama was sworn in as Ghana's 4th president. You can listen to Leonard's conversation with John Dramani Mahama:

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